My daily readings 01/19/2011

Then he joined a company called Pixar and created a revolution in the entertainment industry by introducing computer animated films. Remember the movies: Toy Story, A bug’s life and many more? Pixar was later acquired by Disney and he is now the largest stockholder of Disney.

But what I have described so far is the work of A Creative Genius. So where is the emotional part? Steve recognizes that a technology is relevant to people as long as it satisfies their emotional needs. The keen understanding of the importance of design and the role of aesthetics is reflected in all his products. His ability to combine and recombine ideas, draw associations from his experiences in other fields (example: calligraphy class and Mac special fonts) and establish emotional connection with people have not only created great products but also created great markets for them.

For any person or organization interested in getting lessons in Presentation, Marketing, Creativity, Out of the Box Thinking or Emotional Intelligence skills, just click on the following link and get all five in one by watching his iPhone introduction video. You can bring a lot of efficiency by using this 90 minute video of the Master and reduce or eliminate other training programs.

The author has not charged money for his app yet so while we know some users like the application, it doesn’t tell if they are willing to pay for it.

But my real point is that it depends on the type of users you have. I sell my web apps to towns and city administrations and also to some small businesses. At first we had a few clients for free, their employees didn’t use the application much and we did get some feedback but not that much. The year after, we found clients (including one from our original free clients) who were willing to pay for the service (incomplete, buggy and all) and things changed a lot. These clients had much more users day to day using the system, they also provided much more frequent feedback.

If your client is an organization, the importance something has for them is very often tied to how much of their budget they dedicated to that something.

I made the lucky mistake with Pluggio of not charging from day one. Not because I didn’t want to – but because I didn’t have the payment stuff setup and I was too lazy to do it before launch.

Lucky for me, instead, I made it very easy to signup for free and explained that I would be charging in a few months, but for now it’s 100% free. So signup! Play while you can! Get value out of it! (before it costs anything).

Better Product. More Money.

Due to having so many people testing it out, the site was massively better than it could have been if I had a pay-wall from at the beginning. Subsequently Pluggio retention rates of paid users are thorugh the roof – with the average paid user sticking around for six to nine months.

In my opinion, you won’t make real money on your product until it’s rounded out and bug free.

I would especially suggest not having any kind of Plans & Pricing page that committed to price points or plan limits. Yes have a plans and pricing page, but just say “coming in a few months, for now everything is 100% free”. If you put any kind of real plans and pricing it hurts you because it makes it way more likely for people not to test your product.

Disclaimer: As always there is no one truth, so if you have any counter (or supporting) examples please feel free to comment below.

If Samsung (for example) just made one phone a year, they’d lose market share because it would only be ‘the latest thing’ for a few weeks until someone else came out with an Android phone. Even if Samsung’s product life cycle comes in one-year intervals, the rest of the Android community is much faster, and carriers will be glad to push the latest new phone with the latest whiz-bang features.

In order for Samsung to really compete, they would have to make a high-end, cutting-edge phone, comparable in build quality, features, and software to the iPhone. It would have to stand head and shoulders above the sea of mediocre Android handsets, and stay there for quite a while. It would need to be different enough from the rest that it was a clear winner, the Android phone to own this year. This would have to be said about the hardware and the software.

CEO Trip Adler says that the money will primarily be used to expand the team, which is current at around 45 employees. New hires will mostly come on the engineering side, with personnel also being added to Scribd’s business development and sales teams. Adler also says that Scribd has an agressive product roadmap for the next six to twelve months — a key piece of which will be mobile.

Scribd has been the leading service for social, online reading for quite a while now, but there’s an increasing amount of action in this space from Amazon (via its Kindle platform) and Google (via Google Books). Neither of these are particularly social yet, but Kindle recently started allowing users to ‘lend’ their books to friends for two weeks (which the Nook can do as well), and other social features are likely to follow eventually — a more robust Kindle community would make sense. Of course, Scribd’s corpus of content includes millions of user-uploaded documents, while Kindle and Google Books are mostly focused on published works.